PISSED OFF? TRY EPISTEMOLOGY Vol 2 Issue 18 01 September 2005 Published in Salt Lake Metro

Pissed Off? Try Epistemology  

When I was a youngster the worse thing a person could call someone was “queer.” It was a word that sliced through the soul. For most, it was fighting words but for a sissy boy like me it was a “Scarlet Letter” that stung with the fury of a thousand wasps. No wonder in college T.S. Elliott’s The Love Poem of J Alfred Prufrock held such significance for me.

“And I have known the eyes already, known them all— The eyes that fix you in a formulated phrase…”

Ah! that formulated phrase… “queer”, or homosexual, a rose by any other name… This word queer was stuff of cold sweats and clammy nightmares for many of my generation, until the paradigm shift we call Stonewall turned the world topsy-turvy.  Still it was several years after Stonewall before I was ready to embrace my sexual essence and years more before I was ready to proclaim to the world “I’m here. I’m queer. Get use to it.”  I've lived long enough to see most of the world get used to it and now nearly bored by how ordinary I have become. However that’s another subject.

So how did we get from the love that dares not speak its name to the love that won’t shut up? Some members of the “community” have questioned why the Utah Stonewall Historical Society uses the word lambda so much, and exactly what the hell is a lambda anyway? In a nutshell the lambda is a letter in the Greek alphabet that was first chosen as a symbol for the Gay rights movement when it was adopted in 1970 by the New York Gay Activists Alliance. By 1974, the Lambda was adopted by the International Gay Rights Congress held in Edinburgh, Scotland as the symbol for worldwide homosexual rights. It looks like an upside down Y.

So what is the big deal on what we call ourselves? Plenty. For centuries “converse sex lovers” identified we “equivalent sex lovers” only by our actions not by who we are. Say what? In plain talk- straights have been calling the shots on how to define us forever! Yikes! That is so wrong according to my “new left” college professors in Minority Liberation 101. An empowered people should demand and choose their own self identifying terms.

Take for example the “Black Power” movement of the Sixties which demanded that people of African heritage were to be no longer called “Negro,” or “colored people”. By their example eventually Indians became “Native Americans”, and just forget calling some one from Asia-Oriental. Its “Asian” thank you very much.  

So what’s a sexual minority to do? Pansy, fairy, butt pirate, nancy boy, faggot, sodomite, cocksucker, bugger and queer just didn’t have the right ring for a national movement. I don’t think we would have ever been accepted as Cocksuckers Liberation. Parents and Friends of Cocksuckers and Carpet Munchers. I could be wrong.

A 19^th century swishy German came up with the world Uranian to describe our type of love after Plato’s highest degree of love. It didn’t last but it was a good start. Homosexual, a bastard word of Greek and Latin roots, was coined by the newly emerging psychoanalytic community to describe deviancy from “normal” behavior. A little known fact is that there were homosexuals before there were heterosexuals. The latter terminology wasn't coined until the early 20^th Century.

In the late 1920’s and early 1930’s a minor social phenomenon,  known as the “Pansy Movement”, minced around New York and Los Angeles for a while but not much elsewhere. It didn't last.

In the 1950’s, the Greek roots homo (same) and philo (like or love) were joined to promote the emerging consciousness of "man on man" sex. It didn’t last. In the late 1960’s, the radical youth movement, wanting to distance themselves from a name that conjured up conservative appeasement towards the medical and psychoanalytical establishments, chose Gay! 

Gay! That sounded pretty good and it even had historical roots as a slang word for illicit sex.  Check with Webster. Not only does “gay” mean happy but it also means licentiousness.  So we began shouting Gay in everyone’s face and pissing people off that felt like we corrupted a perfectly good rhyming word for a good time.

The snooty New York Times, which had barely gotten used to seeing the word “homosexual” in print, would have nothing to do with the word Gay for years.  But finally, finally when the word became acceptable in general use the Associated Press’ powers said it was okay to use Gay to mean queer but refused to capitalize the word which would have recognize us as a proper noun! As the Cowardly Lion would have said “the noive!”  

Did they think we would not notice this effrontery? Well they were right. Here we are, some 35 years after “the Committee for Homosexual Freedom” voted “to request all publications to hereafter capitalize the word Gay”, and still we’re caught with our g’s down.  Folks Gay is a proper noun and adjective that describes a people! We are a noun not a verb damn it!

Whether heterosexual writers and lexicographers are, by lower casing the word,  “blamed for psychological oppression of homosexuals,” as the Committee for Homosexual Freedom argued, is debatable. However the rules of English grammar state that those proper names of people, places, and things and the proper adjectives that describe people, places,  and things are to be capitalized! Period!Okay before you think I am being awfully picky regarding a minute (mi-nute) matter, just humor me this.  Are you defined by what you do or by who you are? If actions define your identity then you can lower case yourself all you want. But as for me “Give me a capital G or give me death!” As the great philosopher Popeye proudly proclaimed,” I yam who I yam”, a Queer.